Mayor de Blasio’s Symbolism, Plastic-Wrapped in Arrogance

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Forsaking convenience for familiarity, Mayor Bill de Blasio chooses to work out 11 miles from Gracie Mansion, at a Y.M.C.A. branch a few blocks from where he used to live in Park Slope, Brooklyn.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times

If you asked most people where they choose to exercise, they would surely tell you they run or bike or Zumba, if they can carve out the time, somewhere close to home or work, perhaps on a treadmill, in the basement. Since the beginning of his mayoralty, though, Bill de Blasio, forsaking convenience for familiarity, has instead elected to be driven 11 miles, from Gracie Mansion in Manhattan to a Y.M.C.A. branch in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a few blocks from where he used to live. The trip, made on many weekdays, typically requires two S.U.V.s, except on the occasions when he is joined by his wife, Chirlane McCray, in which case it often takes three.

While this routine had been written off as an indulgent peculiarity, from a politician who manages to embody all of the arrogance of a corporate chief executive with little of the efficiency, it has recently left the mayor fighting off charges of hypocrisy, at a time when he has asked New Yorkers themselves to take on more individual responsibility to combat climate change. During a regularly scheduled radio appearance on WNYC recently, Mayor de Blasio implied that he would not be baited into the “cheap symbolism’’ of taking mass transit to the gym, and that caravan-style mobility was, in effect, his right. His life, he maintained, was not like, “everyone else’s,” a claim that assumes we have forgotten that he ran in opposition to the image of his plutocratic predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as a man of ordinary habits, like any other you might encounter on the R train.

Leaving aside whether or not it is “cheap symbolism” for the mayor of the country’s largest city to ride the subway, at a moment when the system itself is so distressed, Mr. de Blasio has hardly seemed resistant to fits of shallow posturing in the past. During his 2013 mayoral bid, for example, he engaged in ostentatious acts of protest against the prospective closing of Long Island College Hospital in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn — getting arrested and availing himself of the media exposure that comes with handcuffs — only to drop his support for a full-service hospital when he won, and back a plan for residential towers on the site.

Just how damaging are the mayor’s fitness proclivities? According to Charles Komanoff, an energy analyst and founder of the Carbon Tax Center, who phoned in last week to suggest the mayor seek alternative transportation, his one-way trip from Gracie Mansion to Park Slope releases approximately 12 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. There are 2 million registered vehicles in New York City; what if every one of them were dispatched once a day to take a superfluous ride to a recreational facility over 10 miles away?

Beyond that, Mr. Komanoff has calculated the effect of just one car making the trip from the Upper East Side to the mayor’s Y.M.C.A. in Brooklyn. It amounts to a cumulative loss of one to two hours, shared among the hundreds of drivers and passengers in the orbit of the mayor’s entourage, because the presence of just one additional vehicle at a busy time slows traffic enough for everyone to lose a few seconds.

He might be made uncomfortable at the spacious Asphalt Green complex, close to Gracie Mansion on East 90th Street, because of his continued support for the opening of a city garbage-transfer facility nearby. But he could support one of the two gym chains, each with locations just blocks from City Hall, which have made it their mission to reach a broad sector of the population, keeping costs low so that those who could never afford to join a gym might do so. Both chains, Planet Fitness and Blink Fitness, operate in underserved parts of the city — the city in which the mayor has so long declared he would like to bridge economic divides. Two years ago, Planet Fitness opened a branch in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, historically the poorest neighborhood in New York City. Monthly memberships cost from $10 to $20. Blink Fitness has nine locations in the Bronx, and the cost of joining is equally low.

The branches of both gyms I visited downtown are managed by friendly staff members (at Blink they said they would be happy to offer the mayor a discount). City workers use them; there are not just rows of graphic designers on elliptical trainers. There are televisions, and Planet Fitness offers a tanning booth.

The mayor, currently running for a second term, is almost assured of another four years in office, so he presumably sees no reason to change the way he is doing things. Yet at a moment of national turmoil, when mayors are regarded as the great hope of progressive politics, Mr. de Blasio seems to have little understanding of how his self-contradictions and sanctimony erode his authority. When he tells us to stop using plastic grocery bags but doesn’t examine his own behavior, just for a second my inclination is to throw away my cloth carryalls, go to Key Food and ask that everything I buy be individually wrapped, preferably in double layers of polymer. How will the mayor ever persuade the nonbelievers?

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB5 of the New York edition with the headline: Symbolism, Plastic-Wrapped in Arrogance. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe